It's time to talk about the second letter in NASA: Aeronautics. Yes, NASA does mind-blowing things in outer space, but they also want you to get to your family reunion in one piece. NASA is making planes smarter. Smart enough to be flyable even when they're falling apart.

A few years ago, back when the Constellation Program was still alive, NASA engineers discovered that the Ares I rocket had a crucial flaw, one that could have jeopardised the entire project. They panicked. They plotted. They steeled themselves for the hundreds of millions of pounds it was going to take to make things right. And then they found out how to fix it for the cost of an extra value meal.

The power of flight is an amazing thing to get your head around, but apparently you’ve been taught wrong. We know a wing blazes through the air with a shape that causes lower pressure on top of it and higher below it, which affectively sucks the wing upwards. However, it’s the shape of the wing not the time it takes the air to travel around it that produces flight.